Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate Group Super Jazzed For Texas To Force Christianity On Children, Just Like Jesus Did

Or did he?

Jun 29, 2026

a young girl is holding a cross made of paper — Photo by Yosi Prihantoro on Unsplash

Last Friday, the Texas Board of Education voted in favor of requiring Texas schools to teach the Bible in classrooms, and the Family Research Council is pumped. After all, people are becoming increasingly irreligious, and probably the only way to reel a few more in these days is to push Christianity on them as much as possible while their brains are still developing.

From their website:

Five million children will get to hear the gospel because of a new state book list approved in Texas for public schools.
On Friday, the Texas State Board of Education voted to codify a proposed list of required reading that would eliminate titles such as “Romeo and Juliet,” “The Great Gatsby” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and introduce the text of the Bible instead, reported The New York Times.

Oh yeah, because who needs to read some of the most referenced, important literary works in history, plays and books that touch on history, that make children think about racism, how we treat people who are different from ourselves, whether or not a three-day-relationship between a 13-year-old and a 17-year-old is a thing anyone ought to be dying over, whether or not wealth is an inherently corruptive force, and instead, I guess, think about what a great practical joke it is to tell someone to kill their kid to prove their loyalty to you and then stop them at the last moment. Or to turn people into pillars of salt for “turning around” and looking at a city they were leaving.

It continues:

The list proposes that as students grow older, the passages required will reflect different themes present in other classic literature read simultaneously. For instance, 1 Corinthians’ “Definition of Love” would be taught with “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen during students’ senior year of high school.

Except that has nothing to do with Pride and Prejudice other than “They’re both about love.” Actually, if you did want to bring Christianity into it, and be serious about it, a teacher could bring up excerpts of Sermons to Young Women by James Fordyce, the intensely anti-feminist, moralistic, condescending sermons that Mr. Collins attempts to read to the five Bennet sisters, before getting all huffy about their lack of interest in them. That would make actual sense in the context of what they are learning, although it would not be too useful as a tool of evangelizing.

“[This] recognizes a simple historical reality, which is that it is nearly impossible to understand American history and western civilization or really, even the English language without some familiarity with the Bible. The speeches of our founders, Abraham Lincoln, and the sermons and writings of Martin Luther King Jr. are saturated with biblical language and concepts,” David Closson, the director for the Center for Biblical Worldview at Family Research Council, told The Washington Stand.

So you learn about those references when you read those speeches, the same, normal way students have been learning about them for decades.

For what it’s worth, I have no problem with The Bible As Literature classes in college or even in high school; I know a lot of people who have taken and enjoyed such classes. There absolutely are a lot of Biblical references in both modern and classical literature, music and theater, and I probably should have taken one myself. I went to go see Strauss’s Salome earlier this year, and while I loved it and thought it was hilarious, I did keep wondering if the Herod in the opera was the same Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar, as there were approximately 45 Herods. (Same guy, it turns out!) Perhaps I would have enjoyed it even more if that were clear to me.

Perhaps if people had not tried to force Christianity on me, I wouldn’t be so incredibly committed to refusing to know anything about it.

The thing is, we all know that this is not about having a greater understanding of the works of Oscar Wilde, or even Shakespeare. It is about exactly what the lede sentence says it is about. The five million Texas kids who will “hear the gospel.” They think it’s going to be a great recruiting tool.

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It continues:

Closson says that this list doesn’t equate to the imposition of Christianity.
“It’s important to remember that this curriculum is not about requiring students to practice Christianity, or even treating the Bible as a devotional book. This reflects a growing recognition that public education has to often neglect Christianity’s formative role in the development of our civilization. In my view, teaching selective biblical passages in their proper historical literary context is not religious indoctrination. It’s a rather good education. In my view this curriculum is both constitutionally permissible and educationally responsible.”

Except for how it absolutely is, just as how that is the purpose of putting up the Ten Commandments in classrooms. It is about that and about getting people to accept the idea of the United States as a Christian nation founded on Christian beliefs, and to therefore see Christian Nationalism as entirely reasonable within that context.

The thing is, this could very well end up biting these motherfuckers in the ass. After all, there is no actual requirement that the teachers themselves be Christian, as such a requirement would be entirely illegal. Teachers would be free to point out the absurdity of many of these passages, as well as others. The more students are invited to question these ideas, the more they may question the religion as a whole.

Maybe that is why, as far as I know, Jesus didn’t actually go around forcing people to worship him or read the Bible against their will.

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